Director’s VisionsAs a designer, you will be working and collaborating with the Director of the piece. The Director will have a strong feeling of how they want to stage the piece and the themes that they want to focus on. Choose one of the four Director’s visions below which will help to focus your design ideas:

Option 1

I believe that Madama Butterfly is an opera which needs to be treated with absolute purity. It is widely regarded as being close to operatic perfection, so why mess with it? For this reason, I would like to see a design that is accurate to the time and place in which it was originally set. I want to see Nagasaki in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Option 2

Madama Butterfly is a story that transcends time and place. One of the reasons, apart from its exquisite music, that it is still such a firm favourite is that its themes are timeless. I would like to emphasise the timelessness of the production by placing it in a futuristic setting. Since we have no idea what the future is going to look like, it is up to you to decide on how it will look and feel. Make sure that all your choices are ones that will work to enhance the themes of the story.

Option 3

I would like this production of Madama Butterfly to make reference to the constant state of war that the world finds itself in. In order to do this, I would like you to select any current conflict from anywhere in the world and use that as the setting for this production. We won’t be altering the libretto, but I would like to show where we are through the design.

Consider why it would be that Butterfly’s family would be so opposed to the match. Her conversion to Christianity is clearly a key issue in the original, but what is the equivalent in your interpretation?

Option 4

I want to demonstrate that this opera has relevance for us today, where we live. I want to show Butterfly as being “one of us” – a young girl, from a community we know well, who has fallen in love with someone of whom her parents don’t approve. Let us see in the design of the show what

implications this will have on the rest of the characters. How can we make this story one that speaks directly to us in our time?